Jacques Barzun Quotes & Sayings

One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought. — Jacques Barzun

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti. — Jacques Barzun

The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far. — Jacques Barzun

The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers. — Jacques Barzun

The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect — Jacques Barzun

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. — Jacques Barzun

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals. — Jacques Barzun

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation. — Jacques Barzun

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression. — Jacques Barzun

Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done. — Jacques Barzun

Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely. — Jacques Barzun

Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment. — Jacques Barzun

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion to say nothing of the shape of his sentences are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness. — Jacques Barzun

I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers. — Jacques Barzun

To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence. — Jacques Barzun

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn. — Jacques Barzun

Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done. — Jacques Barzun

The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly. The subject - as sculptors themselves are fond of saying - is hidden in the block of material. — Jacques Barzun

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form. — Jacques Barzun

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means. — Jacques Barzun

When all around take fundamental ideas for granted, these must be the truth. For most minds there is no comfort like it. — Jacques Barzun

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history. — Jacques Barzun

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries. — Jacques Barzun

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out. — Jacques Barzun

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least. — Jacques Barzun

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist. — Jacques Barzun

The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte - a keyboard instrument to play "soft and loud." Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply "a soft. — Jacques Barzun

A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements. — Jacques Barzun

On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time. — Jacques Barzun

The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality. — Jacques Barzun

First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word. — Jacques Barzun

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published. — Jacques Barzun

A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth. — Jacques Barzun

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers. — Jacques Barzun

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect. — Jacques Barzun

The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist. — Jacques Barzun

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings. — Jacques Barzun

Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose. — Jacques Barzun

Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire , Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right. — Jacques Barzun

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces. — Jacques Barzun

After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene. — Jacques Barzun

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist. — Jacques Barzun

Life is given us as a passion. — Jacques Barzun

It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual. — Jacques Barzun

When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority. — Jacques Barzun

Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap — Jacques Barzun

Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence. — Jacques Barzun

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice. — Jacques Barzun

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made. — Jacques Barzun

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions. — Jacques Barzun

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred. — Jacques Barzun

We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean. — Jacques Barzun

Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for. — Jacques Barzun

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world. — Jacques Barzun

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works. — Jacques Barzun

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony. — Jacques Barzun

The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity. — Jacques Barzun

To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink. — Jacques Barzun

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish. — Jacques Barzun

No subject of study is more important than reading ... all other intellectual powers depend on it. — Jacques Barzun

If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real. — Jacques Barzun

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way — Jacques Barzun

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game and do it by watching first some high-school or small-town teams — Jacques Barzun

Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention. — Jacques Barzun

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine. — Jacques Barzun

A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us. — Jacques Barzun

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house. — Jacques Barzun

Americans began by loving youth, and now, out of adult self-pity, they worship it. — Jacques Barzun

Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual. — Jacques Barzun

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art. — Jacques Barzun

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness
a color, a weight, a texture
that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions. — Jacques Barzun

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes. — Jacques Barzun

Everybody keeps calling for Excellence excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic. — Jacques Barzun

We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct magnanimity, in short does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches. — Jacques Barzun

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. — Jacques Barzun

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same. — Jacques Barzun

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words
not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable — Jacques Barzun

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots. — Jacques Barzun

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim. — Jacques Barzun

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice. — Jacques Barzun

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle. — Jacques Barzun

Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being. — Jacques Barzun

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can. — Jacques Barzun

Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied only with what it can do, hence accustomed not to feel small stings. — Jacques Barzun

My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more. — Jacques Barzun

The piano is the social instrument par excellence ... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment. — Jacques Barzun

The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all. — Jacques Barzun

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation. — Jacques Barzun

Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin? — Jacques Barzun

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art. — Jacques Barzun

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism. — Jacques Barzun

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy. — Jacques Barzun

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so. — Jacques Barzun

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years. — Jacques Barzun

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind. — Jacques Barzun

Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism. — Jacques Barzun

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation. — Jacques Barzun

[ ... ] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality — Jacques Barzun

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. — Jacques Barzun

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one's scapegoats. — Jacques Barzun